If you’re like many of the millions of American parents who have been directly affected by the Global COVID-19 Pandemic beginning in the United States around early 2020, then you understand the challenges and frustrations that have invariably come with remote learning for your kids. Virtually, in the blink of an eye, parents went from breadwinners and caregivers to homeschoolers and the resident IT help desk. The latter being no easy chore even for actual IT professionals! When the pandemic first hit here in The Bay State, schools immediately closed. In my family’s town, it was on Friday, March 13th. How apropos! First, there was two weeks off for kids as the school system attempted to figure out how to go forward with a remote learning model that had not existed in any appreciable form before for the grade schoolers. Needless to say, it was a bit of an expected technical challenge. Most of the work assigned to our kids were in the form of review material with no appreciable new materials being taught. Couple that with technological challenges almost equal to the quest of how to lockdown that states, test, trace, and develop a vaccine all to fight COVID-19. As well as, Congress figuring out a way to help small businesses and individuals alike with some form of comprehensive COVID relief package. So many things were happening at once. And providing some kind of technology equity for lower-income students to have both Internet bandwidth along with a working Internet-capable computer (most likely a Chromebook laptop) was also part of that challenge. This was because it quickly became evident that students were going to be staying home and learning remotely—to the end of 2020, and most likely hybrid (remote and in-person combo) until the end of the 2021 school year...
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December 13, 2019In modern times, no one man has been more revered as the greatest technological scientist and visionary as Nikola Tesla. This consummate inventor of dreamlike machines, whose reach sometimes exceeded his grasp, has been so highly regarded by society as the scion of invention that whole streets, songs, companies (like Elon Musk’s futuristic electric car company), awards, measures, holidays, places, schools, and more have been named after him. He was even famously portrayed by punk rock legend David Bowie in Christopher Nolan’s 2006 film The Prestige. Of course, in that fictionalized version of Tesla, we find him inventing a trans-dimensional duplicator used by Hugh Jackman’s character for the purpose of inexplicable magic showmanship. However, in real life, Tesla was so far beyond his contemporaries such as Thomas Edison or George Westinghouse that both of them had employed Tesla in their companies at one point. In fact, it is said that Westinghouse even paid Tesla a life-long stipend of a $1000 a month long after he left the company due to his patents making Westinghouse a fortune. Nikola Tesla’s life began in Croatia (the Austrian Empire at the time) on July 10, 1856. His father was an Easter Orthodox priest and his mother was so talented in the making of craft tools and mechanical devices—along with a photographic memory—that Telsa credited her for all of his genius and gifts. Tesla had some troubled years in his youth dealing with a gambling addiction and never completing his engineering studies at Austrian Polytechnic. However, that did not stop him from making his way through Europe, devising patentable inventions, and making a name for himself in engineering circles. Eventually, he would find his way to New York City in 1884 where his advancements in Alternating Current (AC) technology, and an induction motor that was...
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May 6, 2019Email Marketing is essentially a hand-shake agreement between the marketer and the end user/customer that says, “I have a product or service that I would like to you check out, and you have graciously agreed to let me show it to you.” If the end user/customer has not opted-in (i.e. agreed to receive emails from the marketer, and instead receives a flood of unwanted emails (i.e. spam)), then there is no trust whatsoever from the end user/customer of the marketer. With no trust, there is no open rate on the carefully crafted marketing emails, which means it is all just a waste of everyone’s time. Establishing trust between the two is essential for a successful email marketing campaign. That begins with an easy opt-in process for interested customers (or clientele). The following is a short list of six best practices in which to build an effective email marketing strategy. Easy Opt-In for Customers Your company’s website should have a spot on its homepage that allows interested parties to opt-in (or subscribe) to your monthly newsletter, job search tips, and resources emails. Created with a widget for a website homepage such as MailChimp’s WordPress Widget, this plug-in app allows visitors to a website to effortlessly and legitimately add themselves to your email mailing list. Thereby establishing trust between the potential new clients and your company because now these emails are desired. And by extension, also make it easy for subscribers to opt-out or unsubscribe because it is illegal to keep them on the list if they do not want to be there. Define Your Customer Base This may seem obvious but many organizations take a generalized approach to appealing to the lowest common denominator. Collecting random leads from email lists are pointless unless they are specific to your industry and are a high-value opportunity for new business. Ask yourself the...